Joseph Goebbels was born in 1897 and died in 1945. Goebbels was Hitler’s Minister of Propaganda and one of the most important and influential people in Nazi Germany. ·some called him the "Poison Dwarf" ·stayed with Hitler in Hitler’s bunker ·gave poison to his six children and then shot his wife and then himself, gave orders to burn his body
Propaganda is the art of persuasion - persuading others that your 'side of the story' is correct. ·two main tasks: to ensure nobody in Germany could read or see anything that was hostile or damaging to the Nazi Party. ·to ensure that the views of the Nazis were put across in the most persuasive manner possible.
1.To ensure that everybody thought in the correct manner, Goebbels set up the Reich Chamber of Commerce in 1933.
2.Nazi Germany introduced a system of censorship. You could only read, see and hear what the Nazis wanted you to read, see and hear.
3.Books that did not match the Nazi ideal was burnt in public - loyal Nazis ransacked libraries to remove the 'offending' books.
4.The Nazis controlled film production. Leni Riefenstahl made "Triumph of Will" - considered one of the greatest of propaganda films despite its contents.
5.To ensure that everybody could hear Hitler speak, Goebbels organized the sale of cheap radios. Loud speakers were put up in streets. 6.Organized night time displays at Nuremberg (rallies that were designed to show to the world the might of the Nazi nation).
Kristallnacht/ The Final Solution/ Wannsee Conference
Seventy years ago, on November 9–10, 1938, the Nazis staged vicious pogroms—state sanctioned, anti-Jewish riots—against the Jewish community of Germany. These came to be known as Kristallnacht (now commonly translated as “Night of Broken Glass”), a reference to the untold numbers of broken windows of synagogues, Jewish-owned stores, community centers, and homes plundered and destroyed during the pogroms.
Wannsee Conference: On January 20, 1942, fifteen high-ranking Nazi party and German government leaders gathered for an important meeting in Wannsee. Reinhard Heydrich, chief Heinrich Himmler's head deputy, held the meeting for the purpose of discussing the "final solution to the Jewish question in Europe" with key non-SS government leaders, including the secretaries of the Foreign Ministry and Justice, whose cooperation was needed.
The "final solution" was the Nazis' code name for the deliberate, carefully planned destruction, or genocide, of all European Jews.
The Victims
Besides the Jewish people, list seven other groups were also targets/victims of the Holocaust? Briefly tell the fate of each group under Nazi rule. http://www.ushmm.org/wlc/article.php?lang=en&ModuleId=10007457 CLUE: Begin reading at “Targeted Groups”
Roma (Gypsies) - subjected to internment, forced labor, and massacre. They were also subject to deportation to extermination camps. Twins and dwarves, however, were separated out and subjected to pseudoscientific medical experiments under SS Captain Dr. Josef Mengele.
People with disabilities - "euthanasia" was a euphemistic term for a clandestine program which targeted for systematic killing institutionalized mentally and physically disabled patients, without the knowledge or consent of themselves or their families. The victims were told they would undergo a physical evaluation and take a disinfecting shower. Instead, they were killed in gas chambers using pure carbon monoxide gas. Their bodies were immediately burned in crematoria attached to the gassing facilities. Ashes of cremated victims were taken from a common pile and placed in urns without regard for accurate labeling. One urn was sent to each victim's family, along with a death certificate listing a fictive cause and date of death. The sudden death of thousands of institutionalized patients, whose death certificates listed strangely similar causes and places of death, raised suspicions.
Poles - racially inferior. German police units shot thousands of Polish civilians and required all Polish males to perform forced labor. The Nazis sought to destroy Polish culture by eliminating the Polish political, religious, and intellectual leadership.
Soviet prisoners of war - annihilation against the Soviet Union included the killing of prisoners of war (POWs) on a massive scale. The brutal treatment of Soviet POWs by the Germans violated every standard of warfare. 3.3 million, or about 57 percent of those taken prisoner, were dead by the end of the war. Second only to the Jews, Soviet prisoners of war were the largest group of victims of Nazi racial policy.
Afro-Germans - ranged from isolation to persecution, sterilization, medical experimentation, incarceration, brutality, and murder. However, there was no systematic program for their elimination as there was for Jews and other groups.
Political dissidents - persecution, imprisonment, and annihilation
Jehovah’s Witnesses - subjected to intense persecution under the Nazi regime. The Nazis targeted Jehovah's Witnesses because they were unwilling to accept the authority of the state, because of their international connections, and because they were strongly opposed to both war on behalf of a temporal authority and organized government in matters of conscience.
Homosexuals - Nazis believed that male homosexuals were weak, effeminate men who could not fight for the German nation. They saw homosexuals as unlikely to produce children and increase the German birthrate. Nazis intensified persecution of German male homosexuals. Persecution ranged from the dissolution of homosexual organizations to internment in concentration camps.
"Ghetto" originated from the name of the Jewish quarter in Venice, established in 1516, in which the Venetian authorities compelled the city's Jews to live. Ghettos were city districts (often enclosed) in which the Germans concentrated the municipal and sometimes regional Jewish population and forced them to live under miserable conditions.
A provisional measure to control and segregate Jews while the Nazi leadership in Berlin deliberated upon options to realize the goal of removing the Jewish population.
Largest: the Warsaw ghetto, where over 400,000 Jews were crowded into an area of 1.3 square miles. Other major ghettos were established in the cities of Lodz, Krakow, Bialystok, Lvov, Lublin, Vilna, Kovno, Czestochowa, and Minsk. Tens of thousands of western European Jews were also deported to ghettos in the east.
Food allotments rationed to the ghetto by the German civilian authorities were not sufficient to sustain life. “Children starving to death.” Between 1940 and mid-1942, 83,000 Jews died of starvation and disease.
Forced Labor Camps -- often pointless and humiliating, and imposed without proper equipment, clothing, nourishment, or rest. Camp prisoners were forced to work under conditions that would directly and deliberately lead to illness, injury, and death.
Killing centers (also referred to as "extermination camps" or "death camps") were almost exclusively "death factories." German SS and police murdered nearly 2,700,000 Jews in the killing centers either by asphyxiation with poison gas or by shooting.
Soviet forces were the first to approach a major Nazi camp, reaching Majdanek near Lublin, Poland, in July 1944. The Soviets liberated Auschwitz, the largest extermination and concentration camp, in January 1945. There was abundant evidence of mass murder in Auschwitz. The retreating Germans had destroyed most of the warehouses in the camp, but in the remaining ones the Soviets found personal belongings of the victims. They discovered, for example, hundreds of thousands of men's suits, more than 800,000 women's outfits, and more than 14,000 pounds of human hair.
Adolf Hitler, Heinrich Himmler, and Joseph Goebbels never stood trial, having committed suicide before the end of the war.
After much debate, 24 defendants were selected to represent a cross-section of Nazi diplomatic, economic, political, and military leadership. Between October 18, 1945, and October 1, 1946, the IMT tried 22 "major" war criminals on charges of crimes against peace, war crimes, and crimes against humanity, and conspiracy to commit such crimes. The IMT defined crimes against humanity as "murder, extermination, enslavement, deportation...or persecutions on political, racial, or religious grounds." Twelve of those convicted were sentenced to death.
Therefore the IMT also indicted several Nazi organizations deemed to be criminal, namely: the Reich Cabinet, the Leadership Corps of the Nazi Party, the Elite Guard (SS), the Security Service (SD), the Secret State Police (Gestapo), the Stormtroopers (SA), and the General Staff and High Command of the German Armed Forces. Unfortunately, many perpetrators of Nazi-era criminality have never been tried or punished.
The IMT declared to the world that “following orders” was not a legitimate defense for criminal acts.
Holocaust Web Search Key:
Night Web Search
Background Information for the Holocaust
Use the following websites for a quick overview of the following terms and people.
List three things the Nazis did to ensure that their views were shown/heard in the most persuasive manner possible.
http://www.historylearningsite.co.uk/propaganda_in_nazi_germany.htm
· some called him the "Poison Dwarf"
· stayed with Hitler in Hitler’s bunker
· gave poison to his six children and then shot his wife and then himself, gave orders to burn his body
Propaganda is the art of persuasion - persuading others that your 'side of the story' is correct.
· two main tasks: to ensure nobody in Germany could read or see anything that was hostile or damaging to the Nazi Party.
· to ensure that the views of the Nazis were put across in the most persuasive manner possible.
1. To ensure that everybody thought in the correct manner, Goebbels set up the Reich Chamber of Commerce in 1933.
2. Nazi Germany introduced a system of censorship. You could only read, see and hear what the Nazis wanted you to read, see and hear.
3. Books that did not match the Nazi ideal was burnt in public - loyal Nazis ransacked libraries to remove the 'offending' books.
4. The Nazis controlled film production. Leni Riefenstahl made "Triumph of Will" - considered one of the greatest of propaganda films despite its contents.
5. To ensure that everybody could hear Hitler speak, Goebbels organized the sale of cheap radios. Loud speakers were put up in streets.
6. Organized night time displays at Nuremberg (rallies that were designed to show to the world the might of the Nazi nation).
Wannsee Conference
http://www.ushmm.org/museum/exhibit/focus/kristallnacht/
Who attended and what was decided at the Wannsee Conference?
What was the Final Solution?
http://www.ushmm.org/outreach/wannsee.htm
Wannsee Conference: On January 20, 1942, fifteen high-ranking Nazi party and German government leaders gathered for an important meeting in Wannsee. Reinhard Heydrich, chief Heinrich Himmler's head deputy, held the meeting for the purpose of discussing the "final solution to the Jewish question in Europe" with key non-SS government leaders, including the secretaries of the Foreign Ministry and Justice, whose cooperation was needed.
The "final solution" was the Nazis' code name for the deliberate, carefully planned destruction, or genocide, of all European Jews.
Briefly tell the fate of each group under Nazi rule.
http://www.ushmm.org/wlc/article.php?lang=en&ModuleId=10007457
CLUE: Begin reading at “Targeted Groups”
http://www.ushmm.org/wlc/article.php?lang=en&ModuleId=10005059
What was life like in the ghettos?
http://www.ushmm.org/wlc/article.php?lang=en&ModuleId=10007445
A provisional measure to control and segregate Jews while the Nazi leadership in Berlin deliberated upon options to realize the goal of removing the Jewish population.
Largest: the Warsaw ghetto, where over 400,000 Jews were crowded into an area of 1.3 square miles. Other major ghettos were established in the cities of Lodz, Krakow, Bialystok, Lvov, Lublin, Vilna, Kovno, Czestochowa, and Minsk. Tens of thousands of western European Jews were also deported to ghettos in the east.
Food allotments rationed to the ghetto by the German civilian authorities were not sufficient to sustain life. “Children starving to death.” Between 1940 and mid-1942, 83,000 Jews died of starvation and disease.
http://www.ushmm.org/wlc/article.php?lang=en&ModuleId=10005144
What were the conditions?
What different types of extermination were performed?
http://www.ushmm.org/wlc/article.php?lang=en&ModuleId=10005145
Killing centers (also referred to as "extermination camps" or "death camps") were almost exclusively "death factories." German SS and police murdered nearly 2,700,000 Jews in the killing centers either by asphyxiation with poison gas or by shooting.
http://www.ushmm.org/wlc/article.php?lang=en&ModuleId=10005131
What did Hitler do near the end of the war?
How many defendants were charged during the Nuremberg Trials? What did they represent?
http://www.ushmm.org/wlc/article.php?lang=en&ModuleId=10007143
What did the International Military Tribunal decide was not a legitimate defense?
http://www.ushmm.org/wlc/article.php?lang=en&ModuleId=10007142
Adolf Hitler, Heinrich Himmler, and Joseph Goebbels never stood trial, having committed suicide before the end of the war.
After much debate, 24 defendants were selected to represent a cross-section of Nazi diplomatic, economic, political, and military leadership.
Between October 18, 1945, and October 1, 1946, the IMT tried 22 "major" war criminals on charges of crimes against peace, war crimes, and crimes against humanity, and conspiracy to commit such crimes. The IMT defined crimes against humanity as "murder, extermination, enslavement, deportation...or persecutions on political, racial, or religious grounds." Twelve of those convicted were sentenced to death.
Therefore the IMT also indicted several Nazi organizations deemed to be criminal, namely: the Reich Cabinet, the Leadership Corps of the Nazi Party, the Elite Guard (SS), the Security Service (SD), the Secret State Police (Gestapo), the Stormtroopers (SA), and the General Staff and High Command of the German Armed Forces. Unfortunately, many perpetrators of Nazi-era criminality have never been tried or punished.
The IMT declared to the world that “following orders” was not a legitimate defense for criminal acts.